Review: Oh my it’s O-Thai

by gigi on September 10, 2007

UPDATE October 1, 2009: This restaurant is now closed.

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Tricia, Victoria, and I went to O-Thai the other day for dinner. It is a new-ish Thai restaurant at 1626 W. Broadway near Fir Street. Walking into the restaurant, I had a great first impression. I asked the server if he had change for parking because I was at a metered spot and instead of breaking my bill for me, he just gave me some loonies! It’s the small things that count and I hoped that the food would be as good as the service. To find out if it was, you’ll have to read on.

The three of us decided to order a few dishes to share. We started off with an appetizer called kung hom par. These were prawns in a spring roll wrapping with a plum sauce for dipping. These were pretty standard and we even found that the spring roll wrapping lacked the crunch that one would expect with spring rolls.

Pad Thai is always a good benchmark for a Thai restaurant and we decided to order ours with prawns. I found the pad thai to be on the dry side and I could barely taste fish sauce or chillis. Compared to the pad thai I’ve had at other restaurants, this was quite lacking in flavour.

We also decided to order a curry dish from O-Thai’s extensive list of curries. Instead of ordering the standard yellow/red/green curries that can be found at most Thai places, we went with the panaeng curry, which was a dry curry with green beans. We were told that the abundance of beans in the dish made up for the fact that there was less curry sauce for the rice. However, on getting the dish, the beans were more of a garnish than a centrepiece in the dish. This also came with a small dish of jasmine rice.

To round out our meal, we also ordered the pineapple fried rice with prawns. I’m sorry to say that this was probably the worst dish of the evening. I thought it was just me when I bit into the pineapple…and not only was it obviously a canned pineapple (!!) but also because it had no flavour whatsoever! Tricia thought maybe the pineapple was soaking in water or had all the juice squeezed out for some other dish. The prawns…although crunchy, also had no flavour whatsoever.

In all, I found the food at O-Thai to be quite disappointing. Most dishes were lacking in flavour and just bland in general. The best dish of the evening was the dry curry with chicken dish but was not all that special from other Thai curries I’ve tasted. I was really hoping that I would be able to rave about O-Thai seeing that I had such a good first impression…but even the service seemed to be waning as the evening went on. We split the bill amongst the three of us and it came to $34 each after tips and tax.